Update: I was unfortunately not aware of Shamus Young's severe criticism of Fallout 3 available here to link in the original piece and I regret that. It dovetails rather nicely with what I've written and it's much better executed than my piece. I strongly recommend anyone...

GAMING NEWS

Hackers Strike Again, PlayStation 3 Piracy Made Easy

It never ends for poor old Sony. The company has had its fair share of run-ins with hackers in the past, all of which didn't end very well—PSN outage anyone? Well, just when we all thought they were finally in the clear, a group known as "The Three Musketeers" has taken it upon itself to make things even more difficult for Sony.

The group allegedly discovered the LV0 decription keys (which makes hacking and thus piracy much easier), but opted out of releasing them to the public right away. During that time, however, the keys were leaked and a Chinese hacking group released "BlueDiskCFW" (a custom firmware) in hopes of making a sizeable profit. Naturally, this upset "The Three Musketeers" who then proceeded to release the LV0 keys publicly, and since that time a free CFW (custom firmware) that takes advantage of the keys has been released.

The team of hackers released the following announcement:

As this was a group effort, we wouldn’t normally have lost a word about it ever, but as we’re done with PS3 now anyways, we think it doesn’t matter anymore. Congratulations to the guy that leaked stuff, you, sir, are a 1337 haxx0r, jk, you’re an asshole.

People should know that crooked personalities are widespread in this so called ‘scene’. Some people try to achieve something for fun together and make the wrong decision to trust others and share their results with them, but ofc there got to be the attention seeking fame wh*** that has to leak stuff to feel a little bit better about him-/herself. Now the catch is that it works like this in every ‘scene’, just that in others it usually doesn’t come to light.The only sad thing is, that the others who worked on this won’t get the attention they deserve because they probably want to remain anonymous (also they don’t care about E-fame <3).

PS: This is neither about drama nor E-fame nor ‘OMG WE HAZ BEEN FIRST’, we just thought you should know that we’re disappointed in certain people. You can be sure that if it wouldn’t have been for this leak, this key would never have seen the light of day, only the fear of our work being used by others to make money out of it has forced us to release this now.

- The Three Musketeers

So what does this all mean? Basically, the PlayStation 3 now has a major hole in it that a simple firmware update won't be able to fix. As such, there's a good chance we'll see plenty more instances of piracy on the console. To clarify, it doesn't appear that the PlayStation Network has been compromised, but we can't say for sure one way or the other. We'll be sure to update you if/when Sony provides more information on the issue.